Interesting, haven't grabbed Vol 12 yet but doing my own little spring cleaning on the first 11 as well so be curious to see how my list matches up to theirs at the end of it (I've got a feeling that I won't cull it quite so much for starters).
Thierry Henry joins New York Red Bulls
(AP) ??? 20 minutes ago
SECAUCUS, N.J. ??? Stop the rumors about French striker Thierry Henry joining the New York Red Bulls. He's here.
The 32-year-old former Arsenal and Barcelona player signed a multiyear contract on Wednesday and he is expected to make his Red Bulls' debut on July 22 in an exhibition against Premier League club Tottenham.
"Some people might think I am going to go there for vacation ??? I do actually go there for vacation ??? but it won't be for vacation this time," Henry said in a video interview on the club website. "I'm a competitor and I don't like to lose."
Henry was released by Barcelona last month after scoring just four goals last season.
"This marks an exciting new chapter in my career and life," Henry said.
Henry will be introduced at a press conference on Thursday at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, N.J.
"Thierry is not only a world class player who will undoubtedly improve our squad, but he has shown most importantly throughout his career that he is a winner," said Erik Soler, general manager and sporting director of the Red Bulls. "He has made it clear to us that he is committed in the short and long term to help in our vision of making our organization the premium franchise in Major League Soccer."
With France, Henry won the World Cup in 1998 and the 2000 European Championship, but sparked outrage last year when his handball during a playoff match helped to deny Ireland a spot at this year's World Cup.
At the finals in South Africa, France went out at the group stage after the team was beset by a player protest.
Henry guided Arsenal to the Premier League title in 2002 and 2004 before leaving in 2007 to join Barcelona, where he won six trophies in 2009 ??? the Champions League, the Spanish league, the Copa del Rey, the Spanish Supercup, the UEFA Supercup and the FIFA Club World Cup.
The Red Bulls, who previously were known as the MetroStars, have a history of signing star players in the twilight of their careers. Italian Roberto Donadoni played for them in 1996 and '97, Brazilian great Branco was with them in 1997, German Lothar Matthaus in 2000 and Frenchman Youri Djorkaeff was here in 2005 and '06.
None of them led the team to a title.
Red Bulls leading scorer Juan Pablo Angel welcomed Henry's arrival, which was announced just days after New York played a 0-0 tie with D.C. United.
"I think it means everything for the industry in this country," Angel said. "He's arguably one of the best players in our generation. He's a player that has won everything he could possibly win in this sport and he's still fit. I think it's an honor to have him here. He's going to be a tremendous addition to the league, to the Red Bulls."
There have been rumors for almost two years that Henry would one day join the Red Bulls. A year ago, he said he wanted to play in the United States and the door opened recently when he parted ways with Barcelona after a season in which he lost his starting job.
"We have been hearing about it for years now, for it to finally come to fruition is a good thing for the team," Red Bulls midfielder Seth Stammler said. "I'm sure it's good for him for the next step in his career. He's won championships at all levels. To come over here and not prove himself to the world in soccer, but take our team to the next level and hopefully get a championship here will be a good step for him and obviously great for the organization."
Henry wasn't a factor in the World Cup. But the Red Bulls hope a combination of Angel and Henry up front can finally lead them to a title.
"It's kind of wild to think about it," rookie defender Tim Ream said. "Coming in, I knew I was going to be playing with Juan Pablo and I knew what kind of player he was. You put those two together it's pretty incredible. Front two, there is not much you can say about them. They are just spectacular players."
AP Sports Writer Rob Harris in London contributed to this report.
Private firms prepare major initiative on GP commissioning
14 Jul 10
By Ian Quinn
UnitedHealth UK, Tribal Newchurch, Humana, Bupa and Aetna UK are drawing up a framework of potential services GPs will be able to ???buy in??? from the private sector, with companies taking on a share of the commissioning risk. They are confident the White Paper will hugely increase the scope for private firms, with one leading player claiming it will lead to the full 'denationalising' of healthcare in England.
Groups of private healthcare insurance, financial services and IT companies will offer GPs a raft of commissioning support services, following moves to hand them control of ??80 billion of NHS cash. These will include medicines management systems, IT systems, commissioning-support tools, back-office support and patient-management services, many of which have already been used by PCTs under the previous Government???s FESC framework and via individual deals with private firms.
Now the group of private companies, working with undisclosed leading financial companies, are turning their attention to GPs and will be offering to share the financial risk involved in setting up new consortiums, in return for potentially lucrative contracts. However, they will also carry out tough vetting of potential GP partners.
The White Paper sets out plans to provide GPs with a maximum management allowance, including premiums for those who achieve high-quality health outcomes and for financial performance. But Kingsley Manning, director of Tribal Newchurch, told Pulse: ???My guess is that the management fee will be fairly modest and that it will mean the way that GPs will be able to run this is in a collaborative approach.??? He said offering GPs a chance to share the risk of the new ventures would be a major part of the private firms??? strategy, following health secretary Andrew Lansley???s warning of no ???bail out??? for consortiums that fail.
???We???re working on the assumption that there will be some element of risk transfer. Risk management is going to be a very, very important factor.'
???There is undoubtedly some sense that there should be some pain involved. But by working together, private health companies believe they can draw up a series of packages which will not only be highly attractive to GPs looking to reduce costs and share the risk of failure, but fit what are expected to be ultra-tough quality standards demanded by the new independent NHS Commissioning Board.'
Mr Manning said Mr Lansley???s plans could lead to the ???denationalisation of healthcare services in England???, adding that the White Paper ???represents the most important redirection of the NHS in more than a generation, going further than any Secretary of State has gone before'. ???The old certainties are gone: the NHS cannot be protected from economic reality any longer,??? he added.
He said that Tribal Newchurch hoped to have its offer to GPs ready by the autumn when the Health Bill goes before parliament, and that each of the major companies would also be working with their own unique business partners.
???We don???t want to give the impression that GPs are being strong-armed into working with us. They are of course free to do this themselves and indeed we will be fairly cautious as to who we work with. We won???t just be jumping into partnerships.???
The White Paper says: ???GP consortia will need to have sufficient freedoms to use resources in ways that achieve the best and most cost-efficient outcomes for patients.
???GP consortia will have the freedoms to decide what commissioning activities they undertake for themselves and for what activities (such as demographic analysis, contract negotiation, performance monitoring and aspects of financial management) they may choose to buy in support from external organisation, including local authorities, private and voluntary sector bodies.???
...
...The Government has also unveiled plans to ditch Labour???s ???NHS as the preferred provider' policy and switch to a principle of any willing provider, which will reduce the barriers to private firms.
Tony Sampson, director of external affairs at UnitedHealth UK, said: 'There's no doubt that the Government is putting GPs and primary care at the heart of its reform agenda for the NHS. The work we've been doing with GP commissioning groups has been to provide a series of support services, such as analytics, evidence based techology and contracting support. The opportunity to combine this with GPs' understanding of individual patients' needs provides a great opportunity to improve outcomes for patients and provide cost effective care.' Although not involved in the new trade body, Virgin-owned Assura Medical, which runs 15 Darzi centres in England and has 30 GP companies involving 1,500 GPs, also said the White Paper would open up new opportunities, saying the plans ???closely match its business model'.
'We are enthusiastic about the reforms proposed by the Government's health White Paper, said Bart Johnson, chief executive of Assura Medical.
???GPs are crucial to the provision of services and are well positioned to manage the resources available to enhance patient care. We see this as a good opportunity to build upon our current work with GPs and the NHS to improve health outcomes for patients."
Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, who brought in the preferred provider policy while in Mr Lansley???s hotseat, described his successor's plans as giving ???the green light to let market forces rip right through the system with no checks or balances???. He told the Commons: ???Is not the handing of the public budget to independent contractors tantamount to the privatisation of the commissioning function in the NHS? Will there be any restrictions at all on the use of the private sector by GPs????
Kings Fund chief executive, Professor Chris Ham, said the White Paper would ???accelerate the trend??? towards further privatisation, adding that it would lead to ???opportunities for private companies to support GP commissioning and increased opportunities for independent providers to deliver treatment'.
I want to become exempt from paying National Insurance.
There won't be a pension scheme by the time I (and how many other millions in an ageing population?) am old enough to retire, and healthcare is going private, so I'd like to know what the fuck am I paying National Insurance towards exactly?
I'm following the White Paper discussions very closely as it's going to have a pretty major knock on effect on my business for better or worse. I'm very very far from convinced that the plan to go 100% GP commissioning is going to happen anytime soon - I expect it to be watered down pretty significantly before any action is taken.
Kind of unsurprising that the new Government's first explicit move into the "Big Society" theme is to offload the management of much of the services the UK's largest employer into the hands of private companies.
Also, Henry's decision to go play in the US is a very smart move for him to make. He'll rip shit up over there (plus no big games to be a non entity in ;-) )
What is your line of business dude? (PMs if easier)
My gf is the one sending me this stuff, and she's pessimistic about her company's long-term future if this goes ahead. They're still NHS at the moment, but research looks like one of the first things that will be 'cut-loose'. Front-line services, as you say, may get a stay of execution as they're what people will get angriest about.
Fucking Tories carrying on that great Thatcher tradition.
What is your line of business dude? (PMs if easier)
My gf is the one sending me this stuff, and she's pessimistic about her company's long-term future if this goes ahead. They're still NHS at the moment, but research looks like one of the first things that will be 'cut-loose'. Front-line services, as you say, may get a stay of execution as they're what people will get angriest about.
Fucking Tories carrying on that great Thatcher tradition.
Without shooting myself in the foot on my work PC let's just say that I work for a reasonably high profile independent health analysis company that has a lot of big contracts in the NHS and private healthcare. Needless to say the scrapping of at least 150 organisations is something we're watching very closely.
Regarding your gf's business, would sadly have to agree. They'll start streamlining it soon before then hiring third parties (like us) to conduct similar analysis and research while charging a small fortune.
Surely now is the time to take the journey to foreign shores?
Without shooting myself in the foot on my work PC let's just say that I work for a reasonably high profile independent health analysis company that has a lot of big contracts in the NHS and private healthcare. Needless to say the scrapping of at least 150 organisations is something we're watching very closely.
Regarding your gf's business, would sadly have to agree. They'll start streamlining it soon before then hiring third parties (like us) to conduct similar analysis and research while charging a small fortune.
She probably knows you guys then :down:
Surely now is the time to take the journey to foreign shores?
Yeah, the offer from my dad to go and stay with him gets more tempting every day. And then I remember that he lives on the Gulf Coast, and the idylic beach paradise is now a giant oil-stain. I haven't talked to him in ages partly because I don't want to know just how bad it is. I need to man up and ask how badly BP have f*cked things up.
I got round to following DocMcCoy and BeatNick on twitter. I saw that Duder had what looked like a link on his profile but for some reason 'loadofwank' doesn't seem to be a valid page.
I'm not one of those obsessive follow-me-back-types and understandable why you wouldn't want your twitter streams clogged up with 'ROOOOONEEEEYYY'.
Well, of course it wouldn't have ever gotten so bad had the US not refused the Dutch offer of help to clean it up when it was first offered. That was poasted here as well - did you see that? Eventually they took it, after a godzillion barrels more had spewed forth.
Infuriating stance by the US. Easy for them to just offload the blame to BP (who are of course responsible for the accident, but not of course for procrastinating on what to do while their stock free-falls).
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
I got round to following DocMcCoy and BeatNick on twitter. I saw that Duder had what looked like a link on his profile but for some reason 'loadofwank' doesn't seem to be a valid page.
I'm not one of those obsessive follow-me-back-types and understandable why you wouldn't want your twitter streams clogged up with 'ROOOOONEEEEYYY'.
Ta for the link.
I thought that was you. I'll have to follow you back - I do like a bit of banter with The Evil Empire once the season gets going.
The whole thing sucks.
But if I was American, I imagine I'd be really annoyed to see how the relevance, or authority, of Obama and the US Inquiry was shown up to be about as meaningful as a mosquito trying to tap blood from an Elephant's backside. The guy who represented BP obviously didn't give much of a toss, said his apology with little sincerity and fucked-off to the Isle of White for a yacht trip. Oil companies >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> government of Teh Greatest Most Powerful Democracy on Planet Earth. That's what would piss me right off. Votes don't count for $hit.
market forces and making money out of illness by doing as little as possible... how nice... Aneurin Bevan is spinning in his grave...
and as for Thatcher and 1989 - we had the report entitled Working for Patients which proposed what became known as the Internal Market.
nice... hospitals become trusts... big idea was the creation of a market within the NHS so that some parts of the organisation would become providers selling their services to the others, the purchasers.
never mind widespread opposition and history panned out...
1. The whole NHS became fragmented, with each hospital in competition with the others.
2. Primary and Secondary Care were put in an adversarial position. (my mother got the blunt end of this...)
3. The ambulance services were no longer provided by the health authorities and each became a separate Trust (my cousin suffered from this)
4. Like all systems which employ market forces in health care it proved, because of its complexity, to be very expensive, doubling the administrative costs from the traditionally low level of 6% to 12%. FACT and documented.
5. The modest element of democracy in the Health Authorities was removed by taking away members representing staff and local councils and replacing them with government appointees, mainly with a business background
6. Each Trust had its own Board of Directors, not elected by or accountable to its local population and so resembled a private sector company.
source The NHS from Thatcher to Blair, by Peter Fisher and www.nhshistory.net and www.thewelfarestatewerein.com
The gf says different departments within the same building charge each other top whack to carry out work. There's loads of money shuffled around at the end of each financial year - if they have some budget spare, rather than lose it (as in, it should go back into the COMMUNAL pot), different Primary Care Trusts get on the phone to each other to commission phantom projects. From a business model, everything that could be wrong with the NHS is, particularly in that rather than being a pyramid with one boss on high pay at the top, and the largest number of employees being at the bottom end, where my gf works it's upside-down, and there's loads of band 8+ managers and consultants on massive wages (paid for by the public) who do a few days work a month, all fighting over a small number of staff that they can claim to manage, who do the work. Because of the fiercly competitive market for commissioning work, they are always forced to put out unrealistic tenders, and rely on the good will of their staff to get projects done.
My gf is costed for an insufficient number of days to do a review of prisons and prisoner health needs, and she has already worked over the allocated costing, she's working through her own personal development time to try and get the work done, and generally does 9 hours days, without a break, while being paid for a 7.5 hour day. I'm sure this is repeated across the country, and obviously it's even worse for Dr's & Nurses, with terrible results that occasionally make the news.
Paul said:
I saw that Duder had what looked like a link on his profile but for some reason 'loadofwank' doesn't seem to be a valid page.
It's a work in progress. Should take me about twenty mins.
On that subject, can't find the blog here thread so just wanted to mention that the state of the office toilets is now at such a low that I find myself repeating the mantra "Please let there be no evil behind this door" everytime I push the door to enter a cubicle. There are some truly sick bastards working here.
Also, while on the blog thing, standing outside on my fag break a little while ago I saw Ian McShane's face appear on the TV across the road in an advert for some kind of insurance and decided that he's probably in the top five most punchable faces in the British arts.
Comments
Like Gazza's against Scotland in Euro 96, only better.
Someone's had that very idea, it seems.
Thanks Doc.
Interesting, haven't grabbed Vol 12 yet but doing my own little spring cleaning on the first 11 as well so be curious to see how my list matches up to theirs at the end of it (I've got a feeling that I won't cull it quite so much for starters).
14 Jul 10
By Ian Quinn
UnitedHealth UK, Tribal Newchurch, Humana, Bupa and Aetna UK are drawing up a framework of potential services GPs will be able to ???buy in??? from the private sector, with companies taking on a share of the commissioning risk. They are confident the White Paper will hugely increase the scope for private firms, with one leading player claiming it will lead to the full 'denationalising' of healthcare in England.
Groups of private healthcare insurance, financial services and IT companies will offer GPs a raft of commissioning support services, following moves to hand them control of ??80 billion of NHS cash. These will include medicines management systems, IT systems, commissioning-support tools, back-office support and patient-management services, many of which have already been used by PCTs under the previous Government???s FESC framework and via individual deals with private firms.
Now the group of private companies, working with undisclosed leading financial companies, are turning their attention to GPs and will be offering to share the financial risk involved in setting up new consortiums, in return for potentially lucrative contracts. However, they will also carry out tough vetting of potential GP partners.
The White Paper sets out plans to provide GPs with a maximum management allowance, including premiums for those who achieve high-quality health outcomes and for financial performance. But Kingsley Manning, director of Tribal Newchurch, told Pulse: ???My guess is that the management fee will be fairly modest and that it will mean the way that GPs will be able to run this is in a collaborative approach.??? He said offering GPs a chance to share the risk of the new ventures would be a major part of the private firms??? strategy, following health secretary Andrew Lansley???s warning of no ???bail out??? for consortiums that fail.
???We???re working on the assumption that there will be some element of risk transfer. Risk management is going to be a very, very important factor.'
???There is undoubtedly some sense that there should be some pain involved. But by working together, private health companies believe they can draw up a series of packages which will not only be highly attractive to GPs looking to reduce costs and share the risk of failure, but fit what are expected to be ultra-tough quality standards demanded by the new independent NHS Commissioning Board.'
Mr Manning said Mr Lansley???s plans could lead to the ???denationalisation of healthcare services in England???, adding that the White Paper ???represents the most important redirection of the NHS in more than a generation, going further than any Secretary of State has gone before'. ???The old certainties are gone: the NHS cannot be protected from economic reality any longer,??? he added.
He said that Tribal Newchurch hoped to have its offer to GPs ready by the autumn when the Health Bill goes before parliament, and that each of the major companies would also be working with their own unique business partners.
???We don???t want to give the impression that GPs are being strong-armed into working with us. They are of course free to do this themselves and indeed we will be fairly cautious as to who we work with. We won???t just be jumping into partnerships.???
The White Paper says: ???GP consortia will need to have sufficient freedoms to use resources in ways that achieve the best and most cost-efficient outcomes for patients.
???GP consortia will have the freedoms to decide what commissioning activities they undertake for themselves and for what activities (such as demographic analysis, contract negotiation, performance monitoring and aspects of financial management) they may choose to buy in support from external organisation, including local authorities, private and voluntary sector bodies.???
...
Tony Sampson, director of external affairs at UnitedHealth UK, said: 'There's no doubt that the Government is putting GPs and primary care at the heart of its reform agenda for the NHS. The work we've been doing with GP commissioning groups has been to provide a series of support services, such as analytics, evidence based techology and contracting support. The opportunity to combine this with GPs' understanding of individual patients' needs provides a great opportunity to improve outcomes for patients and provide cost effective care.' Although not involved in the new trade body, Virgin-owned Assura Medical, which runs 15 Darzi centres in England and has 30 GP companies involving 1,500 GPs, also said the White Paper would open up new opportunities, saying the plans ???closely match its business model'.
'We are enthusiastic about the reforms proposed by the Government's health White Paper, said Bart Johnson, chief executive of Assura Medical.
???GPs are crucial to the provision of services and are well positioned to manage the resources available to enhance patient care. We see this as a good opportunity to build upon our current work with GPs and the NHS to improve health outcomes for patients."
Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, who brought in the preferred provider policy while in Mr Lansley???s hotseat, described his successor's plans as giving ???the green light to let market forces rip right through the system with no checks or balances???. He told the Commons: ???Is not the handing of the public budget to independent contractors tantamount to the privatisation of the commissioning function in the NHS? Will there be any restrictions at all on the use of the private sector by GPs????
Kings Fund chief executive, Professor Chris Ham, said the White Paper would ???accelerate the trend??? towards further privatisation, adding that it would lead to ???opportunities for private companies to support GP commissioning and increased opportunities for independent providers to deliver treatment'.
I want to become exempt from paying National Insurance.
There won't be a pension scheme by the time I (and how many other millions in an ageing population?) am old enough to retire, and healthcare is going private, so I'd like to know what the fuck am I paying National Insurance towards exactly?
Kind of unsurprising that the new Government's first explicit move into the "Big Society" theme is to offload the management of much of the services the UK's largest employer into the hands of private companies.
My gf is the one sending me this stuff, and she's pessimistic about her company's long-term future if this goes ahead. They're still NHS at the moment, but research looks like one of the first things that will be 'cut-loose'. Front-line services, as you say, may get a stay of execution as they're what people will get angriest about.
Fucking Tories carrying on that great Thatcher tradition.
Surely AON is a more ethical sponsor than AIG.
Why do I feel like football fans know nothing about football let alone finance?
Does Skel know where Millwall is then?
Without shooting myself in the foot on my work PC let's just say that I work for a reasonably high profile independent health analysis company that has a lot of big contracts in the NHS and private healthcare. Needless to say the scrapping of at least 150 organisations is something we're watching very closely.
Regarding your gf's business, would sadly have to agree. They'll start streamlining it soon before then hiring third parties (like us) to conduct similar analysis and research while charging a small fortune.
Surely now is the time to take the journey to foreign shores?
I'm just going to buy a Norwich kit and be done with it.
Ha ha. I thought of getting Forlan on the back of mine.
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=23&storycode=4126565&c=2
GAH. Subscription only.
She probably knows you guys then :down:
Yeah, the offer from my dad to go and stay with him gets more tempting every day. And then I remember that he lives on the Gulf Coast, and the idylic beach paradise is now a giant oil-stain. I haven't talked to him in ages partly because I don't want to know just how bad it is. I need to man up and ask how badly BP have f*cked things up.
I got round to following DocMcCoy and BeatNick on twitter. I saw that Duder had what looked like a link on his profile but for some reason 'loadofwank' doesn't seem to be a valid page.
I'm not one of those obsessive follow-me-back-types and understandable why you wouldn't want your twitter streams clogged up with 'ROOOOONEEEEYYY'.
Well, of course it wouldn't have ever gotten so bad had the US not refused the Dutch offer of help to clean it up when it was first offered. That was poasted here as well - did you see that? Eventually they took it, after a godzillion barrels more had spewed forth.
Infuriating stance by the US. Easy for them to just offload the blame to BP (who are of course responsible for the accident, but not of course for procrastinating on what to do while their stock free-falls).
Ta for the link.
I thought that was you. I'll have to follow you back - I do like a bit of banter with The Evil Empire once the season gets going.
But if I was American, I imagine I'd be really annoyed to see how the relevance, or authority, of Obama and the US Inquiry was shown up to be about as meaningful as a mosquito trying to tap blood from an Elephant's backside. The guy who represented BP obviously didn't give much of a toss, said his apology with little sincerity and fucked-off to the Isle of White for a yacht trip. Oil companies >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> government of Teh Greatest Most Powerful Democracy on Planet Earth. That's what would piss me right off. Votes don't count for $hit.
The gf says different departments within the same building charge each other top whack to carry out work. There's loads of money shuffled around at the end of each financial year - if they have some budget spare, rather than lose it (as in, it should go back into the COMMUNAL pot), different Primary Care Trusts get on the phone to each other to commission phantom projects. From a business model, everything that could be wrong with the NHS is, particularly in that rather than being a pyramid with one boss on high pay at the top, and the largest number of employees being at the bottom end, where my gf works it's upside-down, and there's loads of band 8+ managers and consultants on massive wages (paid for by the public) who do a few days work a month, all fighting over a small number of staff that they can claim to manage, who do the work. Because of the fiercly competitive market for commissioning work, they are always forced to put out unrealistic tenders, and rely on the good will of their staff to get projects done.
My gf is costed for an insufficient number of days to do a review of prisons and prisoner health needs, and she has already worked over the allocated costing, she's working through her own personal development time to try and get the work done, and generally does 9 hours days, without a break, while being paid for a 7.5 hour day. I'm sure this is repeated across the country, and obviously it's even worse for Dr's & Nurses, with terrible results that occasionally make the news.
It's a work in progress. Should take me about twenty mins.
On that subject, can't find the blog here thread so just wanted to mention that the state of the office toilets is now at such a low that I find myself repeating the mantra "Please let there be no evil behind this door" everytime I push the door to enter a cubicle. There are some truly sick bastards working here.
Also, while on the blog thing, standing outside on my fag break a little while ago I saw Ian McShane's face appear on the TV across the road in an advert for some kind of insurance and decided that he's probably in the top five most punchable faces in the British arts.